Abstract:
Look at a shiny piece of metal, like a butter knife, and you would be reasonable to conclude that light cannot move through it. Under certain circumstances, however, you would be wrong.

The science of plasmonics describes how metals can essentially transmit and manipulate light waves at length scales much smaller than their wavelengths. Now, by redoing a classic optics experiment with plasmonics, engineers at Stanford have made key insights into the nature and the practical limits of this up-and-coming nanoscale information technology.